The Heftier They Are...

In a great bout of irony, it is my latest external hard disk purchase which has opted to essentially brick itself. (I exaggerate for effect, the disk itself is fine, but see below.)

I'd bought it barely one or two months ago, just before Chinese New Year. A remarkable 700 odd gigabytes worth of storage (that's about the combined sizes of both my desktop's hard disks), in order to transfer off and backup the remains of my old old college laptop (more than a bit of overkill, seeing in those days, our hard disks being 1-2 gb would be spectacular already.)

I -had- hoped to use it to transfer and sort some of the files on my existing bulky external hard disk backups, at some future point in time.

Alas, good intentions led to me carrying the itty bitty 2.5" hard disk around, with the USB cable still plugged into it, in my laptop bag, and I have to admit I pretty much forgot about it mixed in with the rest of my shtuff (mouse, hard disk for work, power cables for this and that, etc.)

It appears the bag has taken more than its fair share of hard knocks, and one of those knocks may have strained the USB cable, which in turn placed some strain on the USB 3.0 connector and receiving socket (which, if you'd remember, was locked tightly in an embrace.)

Imagine Tab B connected into...

...Socket A

 Those pictures are not the brand I was using (Ovation, using Western Digital hard disk, if you must know), but they will suffice to illustrate what promptly happened.

If we take a closer look at what is actually inside Socket A, and the corresponding USB 3.0 receptacle...

That's one receptacle, by the way, just seen from a whole bunch of different angles. You see those two teeny bits of metal sticking out from the lower pictures? That is apparently where the solder to hold the receptacle in place goes, whereas the ten itty bitty coppery-colored pins may or may not be (but likely are) micro-soldered onto the circuit board for power supply or data transfer purposes or something else cheem like that.

Remember that bit about Archimedes and a lever? Tight fitting USB cable into receptacle... banged around a bit... two microscopic points of adhesion = one USB 3.0 receptacle rattling around and finally rattling right out.

Well, fuck.

Promptly picked it up and discovered that it fit more tightly on the USB cable than into the socket.

Dire threats from my dad about the hard disk possibly doing horrible things to my computer if I dared to plug it in to a powered USB connection (metal, rattling about, maybe sparks or short circuits on the drive's motherboard or the desktop's, I dunno) but it dissuaded me from experimenting for the moment. His suggestion was to go get it exchanged, after all, it's supposed to be five year's warranty.

That was all very well, but after a herculean search, I found the original casing and warranty card... but no receipt. This was Chinese New Year season, y'know. Loose bits of paper get thrown away in the frantic effort to clean up house to receive guests, and other bits get stacked up in gigantic piles of objects sandwiched together. 

Well. That's not good. Especially since a quick Google revealed that there is no official Ovation website, and that all the people with hard disk problems have to cart it over to some weirdly-named company down by MacPherson Road, wherein they will promptly exchange it 1-for-1 with very little fuss.

(Which, of course, implies that quite a lot of people have these problems by the cartloads until the workers are completely jaded. Except... without a receipt, it's unlikely I'm going to get an exchange with that little muss or fuss.)

And even if I did get it exchanged... I kinda wanted the data on my old one more. Like now.

So in usual barely controlled INTP-tinkery type fashion, my hands and nails were soon prying away at the sides of the case wondering why there were no visible screws and what the hell held it together. Enter a handy dandy pocket screwdriver, and I had soon popped it open, feeling that secret little thrill from understanding the insides of these pieces of electronic equipment (I've dismantled my gamepad controller and my printer's printhead and those were cool too. Especially when I managed to put them back together in working fashion.)

And of course, that's when I finally figured out what I said above, about teensy bits of solder and if not shoddy worksmanship, then crappy design planning.

Fortunately, my dad knows a little more than me about these things, so when I brought the disemboweled remains of the hard disk to share and lament the shoddy engineering design, grumping about not having a receipt and wanting the data out of it, he magicked up a SATA/IDE USB 2.0 Cable that he had used for transferring data out of an IDE hard disk, showed me that the hard disk could actually be unplugged from the tiny piece of circuit board which was apparently a USB/IDE connector of some kind, to reveal a perfectly well-functioning IDE socket.

Cool.

Said hard disk went into the magicked up cable, power was duly plugged in, and the other end went into the USB port on my computer and data is being recovered from the perfectly fine hard disk, previously crippled by a shoddy connection.

If only all data recovery jobs were this simple. The cable's price tag said $35, really not too shabby a deal for this sort of thing.

I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to get the hard disk itself replaced (after putting it back together again like Humpty Dumpty), assuming I either spend the effort to find the receipt or just go there and bang table a little until they decide to mollify me. Or if I should just consider it a hundred buck lesson to no longer bother with the dinky portable 2.5" varieties. They look cool, but they sure aren't sturdy at all. Or perhaps it's USB 3.0 and the very design to blame.